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Julie188 writes "The shuttle Discovery re-entered the Earth's atmosphere for the last time Wednesday to close out the space plane's 39th and final voyage. And so marks the beginning of the end for America's shuttle program. Everything about the last flight felt epic, from how it overcame a down-to-the-last-second problem to launch on its final mission in February, to its sunny final landing this week. As it coasted to a stop, Discovery's odometer stood at some 5,750 orbits covering nearly 150 million miles, during 39 flights spanning a full year in space — a record unrivaled in the history of manned rockets."

I have to give credit to NASA. Their HD real-time stream was great! I was able to put it full screen on my 23" monitor, sit back, and enjoy the whole thing!

Note that the first orbital shuttle flight was right about the time my father brought home our first computer, a TRS-80 model III. What I do with computers has changed a bit, but the enjoyment level is about the same (maybe a little lower now). Want to see something really weird? Wikipedia classifies the -3 as a business system. I guess I should just be thankful it hasn't been deleted (yet).

It seems every 4-8 years a new 20 year plan is given to NASA that may or may not have anything to do with the last 20 year plan. Between politics and NASA's own bureacracy, it seems that the US manned space program is stalled. Thank goodness we still have JPL and its hardy unmanned probes.

While we are getting rides from Russia to install experiments from the EU and Japan, perhaps our private sector will advance enough to pick up where NASA left off. Here's to you, Burt Rutan.

JPL isn't without its issues either, but at least they accomplish stuff. My brother worked for them for 5 years until the bureaucratic mess became too much. To hear him describe it, they have a serious brain drain issue where the lure of the private sector takes a lot of their best and brightest. Its a hearty bunch that stay for the long term and manage to get past the politicking.

People who want to be spoiled and lazy don't get difficult degrees in aerospace engineering, physics, etc. and go to work doing serious science work at someplace like JPL. People like that want a good work environment and rewarding work, regardless of the pay. There's lots of engineers who quit their well-paying jobs because the office politics are toxic, the work environment bad, they're tired of all their projects being shit-canned, etc.

Because the 3rd world is the only option to paying our level of taxes. I mean, the US was a 3rd world country until we arrived at our current tax rates.

I know of no libertarian that argues we should pay no taxes. They just don't want to fund roles that they don't believe the government should fulfill. The roles that they do think government should fulfill would keep a country safely out of the category of 3rd world.

All too often, the libertarian's working definition of "waste" is "any program that doesn't benefit me personally". The magic of this line of thinking is that everybody can agree that there's enormous waste in government spending.... and as long as you don't ask them to point out exactly what that waste is, they'll never notice that they're all talking about each others' sacred cows.

The problem I have is that people complaining about the tax code needing to be simplified are usually the ones saying the solution should be a flat tax, "fair" tax, or some sort of national sales tax (in lieu of an income tax). I'll admit, that would be a lot simpler, but so would a simple function. Our tax code can be both simple AND steeply curved so that the very wealthy in society pay their share based on notions of social justice and the fact that they are only wealthy because they exist within a large

The problem I have is that people complaining about the tax code needing to be simplified are usually the ones saying the solution should be...

How about we just look at what other countries are doing and copy them? Why is that never considered in America?

There's lots of room to simplify the tax code while keeping it progressive. For instance, look at the stupid new "Making Work Pay" tax credit, Form 1040 Schedule M. It's nothing more than a tax credit for having a job. Why not just roll it into the tax

I think it is very short sighted indeed to think that you cannot eliminate the worst forms of human suffering in society while at the same time allowing individuals to flourish and prosper due to their hard work and merit. Making sure that no one goes hungry, unclothed, or unsheltered is not an impossible task, and it can be accomplished with minimal sacrifice by the rest of society.

As to the flat tax being fair, it's simply not for an easy to understand but often dismissed reason. Simply put, the more mone

Seriously though, as a political science major, I do take exception to that. There are plenty of people in the field doing good research that widens our view of how government operates, when and how it fails, how to avoid the problems of the past, and give us new ideas and models to use in the future. Society is sufficiently complex that we need people trained specifically to write, analyze, and revise policy that implements the will of the people. It is capable of being just as rigor

Maybe the lure is not having to deal with all the Powerpoint happy middle managers that keep the program mired in bureaucracy. Just because 'the best and the brightest' want to leave doesn't mean there isn't a fuck-ton of 'mediocre and not so smart' left behind.

Where's the love for the JHU APL? (Note that MESSENGER is just a few days from its Mercury orbital insertion)

As to Discovery, it's particularly bittersweet to watch her retirement. I saw her launch firsthand as a kid in '85 (STS-51D), which had a big impact on me. A good part of the reason I'm (still*) at NASA today. Discovery was the orbiter for both return to flight missions. She launched HST.

I also had the privilege to watch her last launch. I admit, it almost brings a tear to my eye.

* Working at NASA was more of a right-place-right-time opportunity for me. Not leaving NASA in disgust years ago is largely due to the love of the program I have, largely instilled by that early shuttle launch.

I'm not sure I'll be cheering for the private sector, over NASA, anytime soon. If you think those guys wouldn't take government money, you're high, and I'd rather see that money go to NASA than some guy that will ultimately use it for self-enrichment.

Huh. Imagine that! Every 4-8 years NASA gets new marching orders that force it to waste the money it spent on the last marching orders by axing those projects.

And every 4-8 years we get a new President.

What an astonishing coincidence!

What really needs to happen is that we need to somehow enact a law that says the President isn't in charge of NASA and can't order them to drop everything in favor of something else on a whim. The history of NASA from the shuttle onward is pretty tragic, and not because NASA or the idea of a national space agency sucks, but because idiots keep screwing with their budget. The shuttle itself was supposed to be a proof of concept - - Let's show that we can build a space plane with this prototype and then go build a production model that's cheaper and works better. But budget restraints canned that.

Then they got new budgets and were going to try for a good space plane again, and then W got into office and decided to go to Mars, so NASA had to drop everything and start working on the Mars trip. Then Obama took office and killed the Mars trip - not that I entirely fault Obama for doing that since the Mars trip was unworkable as ordered, but the point still stands. NASA has become a huge waste of taxpayer money not because of NASA mismanagement, but because of mismanagement of NASA. It really does need some independence, because we've progressed beyond the point where viable programs can be ordered and delivered in 8 years, so all we have is NASA working for at most 8 years on something and then being told to throw everything from that program away because the new President isn't interested in it.

US Government's Plan for Nasa - 2011 to 2031:-Gradually close down the US space program and subcontract all spaceflight to private sector companies-Sell off the shuttles so we can finally pay off our pawn loan and get that sweet guitar back-Lose edge on space-based achievements and discoveries to other more honest nations that don't have need to over-fund stealing oil from the middle east-Divert all space funding to an illegitimate war for control of a doomed source of fuel-Gradually divert all science, mat

It seems every 4-8 years a new 20 year plan is given to NASA that may or may not have anything to do with the last 20 year plan. Between politics and NASA's own bureacracy, it seems that the US manned space program is stalled. Thank goodness we still have JPL and its hardy unmanned probes.

Gee, good thing then that the new plan is smaller missions involving the development of specific technologies and capabilities, rather than a 20 year plan requiring single-purpose development, so that when the next cycle comes, even if the new guy changes plans, we still have what we already built.

BTW, Burt Rutan is awesome, but it's Elon Musk who is going to be providing the rides first.

As someone who was there watching the launch in person, it was definitely a nail biter. Forty seconds left in the launch window, though I suppose they could have waited a day and gone up then.

It almost got delayed a day anyway. There's a minimum separation time between when one ship leaves ISS and another one docks, and if they had held fast to that schedule, it would have been delayed until Friday because of the late departure of... I think it was a Soyuz mission. They decided to override that and go on Thursday anyway. Either way, there presumably was an alternate launch window already planned for Friday.

The best part was how many people reacted to the original mission schedule in the same way. NASA's banners said that it would be up for 10 days and spend 363 days in orbit. Immediately, my reaction was, "Wait... you're within two days of being up there for a year, and you're not going to do it?" Well, they extended the mission by two days.

And just to anthropomorphize the shuttle a bit, I don't think general purpose computer 5 was ready to go to a museum. It failed to shut off. I particularly liked the controller's comment when he said that they'd be sure not to use that switch on the next flight. Hilarious.

I have been feeling that the shuttle program was a big mistake for NASA. It's had too many problems, never flew as often as it was supposed to, and couldn't get out of low orbit, and has been shut down too many times, and cost more than it should have per launch. It might have been ok if they could have flown monthly as was originally planned, but it never even approached that ideal.

What would have happened if they dropped the shuttle program early on, and did anything different for manned flight. The shuttle program is known more for its problems than for its successes. It never grabbed much public attention, and became more of a "another shuttle launched? when did that happen?". It didn't have a plan to evolve, so we have been stuck with the same technology for these long years. A non-reusable program would, at least, give us more chances to evolve the design.

Two tragic accidents, yes. But a mistake? I'd call it pretty remarkable for our first partially-reusable spacecraft. It did things nothing else could pull of, like bringing back satellites. Hopefully, the next generation will figure out how to do it with a totally and *legitimately* reusable system.

So what? What use is there in bringing back satellites? That's an utterly stupid requirement. If a satellite is bad, then let it burn up in the atmosphere, and build and launch another one on a Titan rocket. It's safer and cheaper than trying to salvage a bad one. Why should people risk their lives trying to salvage bad satellites when it's easy to just build new ones? What's more, the Shuttle can't even reach many satellites (such as ones in GEO).

Some satellites cost a couple of billion dollars to build and deploy. Spending a couple of hundred million to retrieve and refurbish them, then a couple hundred million to put them back into orbit, is a bargain compared to building a new one.

As for GEO, we need only make a GEO-capable shuttle.

I really don't get why people get hung up on $/kg when the major expense of most projects is in design and inventing and testing and building of manufacturing and support facilities. But in a lot of vehicles, the siz

So what? What use is there in bringing back satellites? That's an utterly stupid requirement

You have to realize it was a cold war requirement to F with the soviets low altitude photorecon satellites. Back then they launched with actual photographic film, you know, like light sensitive celluloid or whatever. So the threat that we could scoop them up:

1) Made them launch higher, thus lower res, less payload = less film.

2) Made them threaten to put a little self destruct mechanism in the satellites, making them waste payload mass (and volume, I suppose)

Another idea was we'd deploy military sats, and if they didn't work, rather than leaving them up there for the soviets to mess with, or even worse, having them land on soviet territory, we'd just pick em up and take em home.

The last idea was, of course, being all things to all people all the time, some doofus promised we'd have 100 launches per year, so if we're up there on a.mil mission anyway every 3 days or whatever, why not stick to high res chemical photography for our own sats? Kind of like a mini-orbital unmanned space station.

So there were very solid cold war reasons to bring back sats.

You have to realize, all the design work was done in the early 70s, forty years ago. Very few electronic products have forty year runs.

The whole thing was a bad idea, and it was all driven by a stupid military requirement to be able to bring back satellites from space. If it weren't for that requirement, they could have done something just like the Russians: a small capsule for people (Soyuz), and a big disposable pod for cargo (Progress). The total costs of this type of system are much lower than the Shuttle. There is absolutely NO reason to ever bring large cargo back from orbit (unless maybe you've recovered an alien artifact!). If

The Soviets copied our space shuttle, and put it into orbit. But Buran [wikipedia.org] sucked, the Soviet space program is dog-slow, and the fall of the Soviet Union intervened, so they mothballed it after the one (unmanned) flight and fell back on Soyuz [wikipedia.org].

If it hadn't been for all their schizophrenic dipshit specifications (polar orbit launches from Vandenburg, etc.) the Shuttle might have been designed to live up to the hype, instead of the camel-by-committee it turned out to be. As it is, we're retiring a 27 year-old vehicle which spent 365 days on orbit. The "space pickup truck" flew 39 missions - that's not even close to two a year. Still, a decent ship we learned a lot from. Maybe the commercial people will learn to stick to a single mission criteria envelope.

The 2 week turnaround was a little aggressive, but it's not the reason each shuttle didn't fly more often. Lack of missions and the existence of the other shuttles made the rapid turnaround unnecessary. Although the fact that the 2-week number was bollocks from the start is one of the reasons there are so many shuttles.

Just to expand the above Vandenburg/polar info, it was a crucial decision in the Shuttle design. If there was a problem a single orbit after a launch from Florida, the Earth has turned and it could land in the continental US. Vandenberg and polar meant it was out in the Pacific and needed to glide. This meant wings, not something envisaged for the lifting-body designs. These totally changed the design ethos; wings are weighty and a structural weakpoint. They turned the spacebus into an armoured car.

who occupy the White House and Congress. Who are more concerned with staying in power and therefor buying off friends, family, and supporters, with our money instead of keeping America great. America has become their second priority behind themselves. Where we have such a convoluted tax system that the IRS's budget is two thirds of NASA's.

While I was not a fan of the shuttle program for many years it is the image people most associate with the American space program. They were big, bold, and beautiful, compared to simple rockets. Each launch was impressive. Unfortunately tragedy and money being directed at buying off people for votes will keep us from getting back to the good days of NASA. Sure we still fly the occasional probe and such but they don't inspire me at least, not like seeing men do something up "there".

That seems like a bizarre claim when there's probably more commercial interest in spaceflight today than ever before in the history of the human race. Dozens of groups are building suborbital rockets, SpaceX has built and flown two new orbital launchers with new engines for less than the cost of NASA putting a dummy upper stage on top of a shuttle SRB, and at least some of those groups will come up with innovative ways of reducing the cost of spaceflight as a result.

manned spaceflight is a waste of resources, much more cost effective to do things remotely. Nothing of our current "primate-in-a-can" approach to space stations proves much other than that weightlessness is VERY unhealthy. All the experiments can be done much more cheaply remotely.
We should develop propulsion and probe tech until we have breakthroughs such as controlled fusion that will allow us to make serious colonies and spacecraft that are inhabitable indefinitely.

There has to be a simple reason why they don't leave it up there, but I don't know what it is. It costs $$$ for every kilo that goes into orbit. It's an airtight space full of equipment and other useful things. It has engines and a bit of leftover fuel that could be used for station keeping.

What aren't the shuttles just made a permanent part of the station and source of parts and the crew just sent down via MIR or something?

It's far from airtight and is only designed to operate in space for a couple of weeks (which is why they didn't go to a great deal of trouble to make it airtight). Cooling and power would be problematice and the interior space is small compared to a space station module.

A number of people have suggested this and there's no good reason to do it and lots of good reasons not to do it.

So you'd use it as somewhat leaky storage and a source of spares and raw materials.

There's little commonality between shuttle parts and ISS parts, no-one is going to be melting down the shuttle's aluminum for raw materials to build new space station parts, and you'd need to bring more supplies into space to keep the atmosphere from leaking out (plus more fuel to raise the orbit since you'd have another hundred tons of mass). It's simply a lose-lose proposition.

My three year old is fanatical about space, planets, the moon, astronauts, everything. How am I supposed to explain to him that our "great" country doesn't do any of that stuff any more? What sort of answer can I give him that doesn't sound a complete fucking cop-out? I have yet to think of one.

And it should be obvious that a dozen people can get the job done quicker and better than one.

Why?

I'd note that Indian rockets seem to have shown a remarkable tendency to explode since they switched away from Russian engines. It may be unrelated -- after all, American rockets explode too -- but it does seem a bit of a coincidence.

What is with all this nationalism? I thought we were all supposed to be global now? Welcome to reality, where you can't outsource all your factories and then get enough tax money to blow on things like shuttles, which BTW was supposed to be a "space truck" which never actually fulfilled its mission.

We went from 80% factory jobs at the birth of NASA to now 80% service industry (with a severe cut in pay to boot!) and the simple fact is we're broke. We're the guy writing hot checks at the Walmart to pay for Chinese goods because the national bank account is nothing but red ink. Hell if we spent within our means we probably wouldn't even have a military as big as Brazil, and we sure as hell wouldn't be fighting two endless wars.

I personally wish China and India luck, as they will eventually find what we are gonna have to wake up and accept...capitalism doesn't work with technology. There was a good reason why nobody in Star Trek was waving money around, that is because as you reach a certain technical level you don't really need human labor anymore. You think we are in bad shape now? Wait until automation hits the service industry.

Despite our brilliant leader's idea that piling ever more debt to get ever more degrees (what are we up to now, a Bachelors is the new HS diploma?) to chase ever fewer jobs the simple fact is the way we've done things for the past 4000+ years is coming to an end. The machines are faster, smarter,more accurate, and they never tire or make mistakes.

We can't all be CxOs, doctors, or IP lawyers, so you either make up BS "make work" programs to give you an excuse to cut all these people a check, you have massive unemployment and underemployment like we have now, or you find a new way. The only question is whether that new way will come peacefully or with massive riots and destruction.

So don't look at the shuttle as the end, look at it as a scary and exciting new world beginning. The old ways of doing things have failed, as evidenced by 22%+ unemployment and the fed drowning in red ink while the presses smoke from all the money being cranked out, the odds of giving the huge masses of poor jobs they can actually do is virtually nil since the machines can do them better, and outsourcing has taken most of the rest. Now the question becomes, what to do next? Do we stay on the failing road of capitalism, where the top 1% get fatter until we have another revolution, or do we try something else?

Because like it or not folks we're broke, and whether the talking heads want to admit it or not for huge masses of your fellow Americans this IS another depression. Only as we have seen we can't use war production to get us out of this one, since nothing is built here anymore.

I'll believe we're broke after I see Congress vote to rescind Bush's tax cuts for the rich, and/or cut the defense budget by double digits. Until then, I can only interpret the constant refrain of "we're broke" as meaning "we're going to use the deficit as an excuse to stick it to poor people; but not we're not SO worried as to consider doing anything that might anger our valued campaign contributors".

Good. That means we can focus our resources on real space science, while the Chinese discover for themselves that there's no valid reason to send humans into space for the foreseeable future.

I roll my eyes whenever I hear phrases like "real space science". Nobody in the world does it or has done it with a space program.

For example, there have been a number of robotic missions to Mars which have uncovered something interesting within a short period of the start of the mission, but which the mission did not have the tools to follow up on. For example, the Viking missions attempted to test for life with mixed (though thought to be negative due to the high risk of false positives) results. In particular, it's taken us about four decades to repeat the "labeled release" experiment.

Similarly, the Phoenix mission imaged some sort of white deposit on the legs of the vehicle which appeared to sublimate like water ice. But no means was available to figure out what the substance was. We'd have to duplicate the landing of Phoenix with instruments positioned to take that measurement. Who knows when that will happen?

Where are all the space telescopes? On Earth there are hundreds, perhaps even thousands of research quality scopes, just in visible light, and a significant number of instruments in radio frequency. According to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], there are something like 35 active observatories (I count probes with multiple instruments in difference frequencies such as Swift Gamma Ray Burst Explorer, as many times as they appear in the list) throughout the spectrum, many operating past their expected life times and another 15 planned for the next ten or so years.

For my final example, consider the remarkable lack of space science on or around the Moon since the end of Apollo. It was twenty years before anyone tried to image the Moon again. Back in 1961, they first hypothesized there might be water in the polar regions of the Moon. Even now, fifty years later, we don't know the extent or accessibility of this water (and other volative compounds). And it's only now that any missions to investigate the polar regions of the Moon have been proposed (which I note will be the first sample return missions in forty years).

This is the problem with so-called "real" space science. We have simple questions which can't be addressed for decades or longer, because the probe doesn't have the capability to do more than a few little things. The investigators will die of old age before resolving some of these issues. We have small numbers of orbital instruments working in any given spectrum or role, so there is intense competition for access.

What humanity really has here, is minimal space science. This is what you'd expect to see, if space science were being managed almost solely for appearance's sake.

I see it as like most recent space related activities as being remarkably lacking both in ambition and sense. In the long term, you need to shorten decision cycles from decades to minutes or hours. If you have instruments with huge pent up demand, you need to provide more of those instruments.

Economic sense is lacking. Building one-off objects just makes a series of very expensive projects. Generally, if the scientific purpose was important enough to make one probe or observatory, it's important enough to make half a dozen. You can split development costs across a larger number of missions.

Some probes such as the Europa Astrobiology Lander or Hayabusa Sample Return, could literally be repurposed for dozens, perhaps hundreds of icy moons, asteroids, and comets throughout the Solar System. Imaging satellites could be used almost anywhere. There's no real reason we couldn't have dozens of small space probes voyaging forth to image every major space body in the Solar System out to say the orbit of Neptune, right now. The first probe might cost a lot, but the 50th pro

I do agree with much of what you're saying. IMO, the last 40 years of NASA human space expenditures has been totally wasted. If it had instead been spent on producing standardized probe designs in larger quantities, we probably could have had 10X the number of unmanned missions by now on the same space budget.

I don't agree that humans are the best decision makers in deep space missions. 99% of the resources of any such mission will be dedicated to simply keeping the humans alive, and such missions will alwa

I don't agree that humans are the best decision makers in deep space missions. 99% of the resources of any such mission will be dedicated to simply keeping the humans alive, and such missions will always be rushed due to supply, radiation and psychological issues. Even pulling off a single human mission to mars would probably suck dry NASA's funding for two decades, just to pull off little more than a flag planting stunt.

Even if we assume the best case, that 100% of a robotic mission is devoted to space science while 1% of a manned mission would be, the humans still only need to outperform robotic missions in scientific output by two orders of magnitude. It's not that hard, especially given that you vastly shorten the question/answer cycle from decades to anywhere from minutes to weeks.

Sure, I'm being a bit glib. But if you look at the moment to moment activities of lunar excursions during Apollo missions and compare the

Tens of billions? The current mars rovers cost less than $1B each, and lunar rovers would be vastly simpler: far smaller launch vehicle, no deceleration from interplanetary speeds, 1 second control delay vs. 20 minutes (which allows direct interactive remote control like a kid's toy). Even the USSR was able to operate rudimentary rovers on the moon back in the 1970s (which also traveled dozens of kilometers) after their manned moon project tanked.

The USSR managed to land their tank-like lunar rovers on the moon with a Proton rocket. That rocket is still available for < $100M per launch. Six identical copies of a probe system just aren't going to cost massive amounts of money, considering that almost everything in the mission has been done before.

The US Surveyor program, which landed 5 probes on the moon, cost less than $500M ($3.5B today). Considering that almost nothing of what they did had ever been done before by the US, that kind of puts an u

You're an idiot and a troll. You have no appreciation whatsoever for the engineering or contingency planning involved. If you want to bitch about government waste, take a look at the Defense Department, which gets more like 50% of the budget, rather than at NASA, which gets more like 1%.

To be fair, the Shuttles had proven to be somewhat accident prone (about 1 flight in 100 ends in disaster) so shutting down the project isn't that crazy. What is crazy is that they're being shut down before any sort of replacement is even close to ready. Then just go "well, I guess the private sector can do it, right?"

Much as I hate(d) Bush, you have to admit that the Shuttle is/was due to be EOL'd before more people got killed. Besides, the budget for it really was stifling any new projects. And Orion was more like the "successor" to Apollo than to Shuttle.

He'll be remembered as the anti-Kennedy for shutting down the US manned space program.

The Columbia investigation committee decided that the shuttle should be recertified if NASA wanted it to fly past 2010. No-one thought that going through that process made any sense, so that was the end of the program. Bush just happened to be President at the time.

The shuttles were only 35% through their rated lifespan.

There are concerns about aging of a number of parts which were never designed to be replaced because the shuttles weren't supposed to fly for thirty years; you'd have to take the airframe apart to replace them and then you might as well build a new vehicle instead.

Obama didnt help much by shutting down its successor.

That's probably the best thing Obama has ever done. If NASA replaces expensive NASA-only launchers with launch services purchased on the open market, they can concentrate on developing new technologies and travel to places beyond Earth orbit which commercial organisations won't be doing any time soon.

A thousand years from now the American space program will be a historical footnote, like the Viking discovery of North America. A few hundred years from now, some other country will do a space program right. Probably by using nuclear propulsion instead of chemical rockets. And that will be the real space age.